Holocaust denial is a convenient polemical substitute for anti-semitism. There are some differences in the way the various strands of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front national react to it, but, as a whole, the party takes a conciliatory line. Since its foundation it has gradually been incorporating the claims of holocaust deniers into its ideology. Recurrent references by FN leaders to the period of the second world war, slips of the tongue that are actually quite deliberate, and constant harping on the theme of "Jewish conspiracy", are part and parcel of a holocaust denial strategy. The various appeals to anti-Jewish feeling, reflecting a deliberate policy, are intended to give a battery of signals to the anti-semitic electorate that already votes for the FN or is moving in that direction.
The FN accepted the denial of history from the outset. François Duprat, a card-carrying party member, was one of the main purveyors of holocaust denial claims in French and international far-right circles. In March 1978 he was killed by a car bomb. The FN’s official newspaper, Le National, carried the funeral oration, which described him as an "historian" concerned with the "struggle for historical truth." It ended on the following note: "Know that you did not die in vain, for we shall take up the struggle. Your work will be continued! (1)" For ten years Jean-Marie Le Pen accepted holocaust deniers in his party but said nothing in public.
In 1986 the FN ideologists revised their ideas about the potential media impact of holocaust denial. The Roques affair marked the first step. In an interview published in National Hebdo, Le Pen made his first public statement on the matter. He trod carefully, but avoided condemning Henri Roques for his denial that the gas chambers had existed. "This is not a matter for the administration or the courts," said Le Pen. "It is a purely a question of historical research .... All reasonable people accept that Jews died en masse in the Nazi camps. What "revisionist" historians are disputing is the method of extermination, i.e. the gas chambers, and the numbers involved, i.e. six million .... These are matters for specialists and must be settled by historical methodology. In the case of the genocide of the Jews, I do not find it surprising that historians on both sides should, in all good faith, take time to put forward their figures (2)." By taking up the cherished themes of the holocaust deniers and referring to them as historians, Le Pen sought to lend credence to the claim that they were engaged in genuine historical research and to make holocaust denial respectable.
A few months later Le Pen confirmed his party’s commitment to holocaust denial. On 13 September 1987, as a guest in a panel discussion programme (Le Grand Jury RTL-Le Monde), he referred to the gas chambers as "a point of detail of the second world war". Protesting that he had not seen them with his own eyes nor made a special study of the question, he asked whether the existence of the gas chambers was "a revealed truth in which everyone had to believe". It was, he claimed, "a subject of debate among historians". Asked whether he was familiar with Mr Roques’ ideas, Le Pen replied in the negative, although his comments on the subject had been reported in National Hebdo only a few months previously.
The "point of detail" was no slip of the tongue. It was a further step towards the incorporation of holocaust denial into FN ideology. The party’s language became more radical, as the FN press began to denounce the "myth of the six million". The party’s followers were apparently not shocked by this. Eight months later, Le Pen won 14.4 % of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. That year, holocaust denial literature was again on sale at the party convention. A year later, at the FN’s summer school, Le Pen indulged in a pun, "Durafour-crématoire", at the expense of the minister for the civil service, the last syllable of whose name means "oven". The clumsy reference to the gas chambers was not lost on the public. As in the case of his earlier "slip of the tongue", Le Pen was taken to court.
The media attention paid to the FN leader highlighted his obsession with the period 1939-1945. Le Pen is out to mutilate holocaust history and confuse the issue of the Nazi occupation. His purpose is twofold. First, to rehabilitate the Vichy regime. Second, to deny the crimes committed by the Third Reich in order to establish it as a respectable reference, if not a model. The FN’s anti-immigration focus should not blind us to the turn taken in 1989, when anti-semitism became a regular feature of its propaganda. The first shot was fired by Le Pen himself, in an attack on the "Jewish International". The aim is to discredit the political authorities by accusations of "Jewish domination" and frequent use of terms like "government Jew" or "media Jew".
Breaking down the last barriers
The FN is the only party whose platform includes a defence of the right to deny the holocaust. In July 1990 FN deputy Marie-France Stirbois was the sole member of the Assemblée Nationale to vote against the Gayssot Act, which made the denial of Nazi war crimes a criminal offence. She described it as a totalitarian attempt to establish official truths and give historical statements about the second world war the status of "official dogma" (4). Subsequently, the "fifty proposals" put forward by the FN’s national delegate and second-in-command, Bruno Mégret, included the repeal of "anti-freedom legislation".
On the twentieth anniversary of its foundation the FN confirmed this stance by incorporating in its platform "Sixteen lines of action to implement the great alternative". The measures proposed are directly relevant to holocaust denial. They include "defence of the fundamental freedoms of teaching, research, enterprise, work and information" and the "guarantee of freedom of expression through the repeal of anti-freedom legislation" (5).
Speaking in Munich on 5 December 1997, Le Pen again described the gas chambers as a "point of detail". Following this, some differences of opinion emerged within the FN as to how to the strategy should be pursued. Bruno Mégret, in particular, supported the "battle for freedom of vocabulary" but argued for greater moderation.
Apart from such slight differences of emphasis, the FN unanimously approved Le Pen’s statement. Martin Peltier, editor of National Hebdo, admitted having received one or two disgruntled letters but emphasised the overall absence of disapproval within the party. The FN leaders were no longer concerned to trivialise holocaust denial. Their attempt to incorporate it in their electoral strategy had succeeded. Ten years ago, the "point of detail" had provoked resignations and public criticism from within the party. Today, the ideological groundwork has been done and the scene is set.
Martin Peltier wrote that, by repeating his remarks in Munich, Le Pen was simply "asserting loud and clear that no word shall remain taboo and that the task of nationalists is to reclaim historical and political vocabulary and to free public debate from the restrictions imposed by the language police (7)". According to him, the FN leader was out to "break down the last barriers preventing people from accepting FN ideology" (8). These barriers had their origin in "the manipulation of the history of the second world war", a manoeuvre wholly conceived and implemented by the victors to discredit the far right for all time by portraying it as guilty of an act of unprecedented barbarity, i.e. the alleged extermination of the Jews. The general disapproval of which the FN was the "victim" was simply the result of this manoeuvre. And the manoeuvre itself was based on a lie.
Peltier argued that the "battle for memory" might appear pointless
to the population at large but was in fact of crucial importance.
Notwithstanding Jean-Marie Le Pen’s political rhetoric, the gas
chambers were not a "detail". They were "the central weapon in an
armoury designed to exclude nationalists from political life." It was
because of this exclusion that the French people were crushed by
taxation and delivered up defenceless by criminal governments to
invasion by the third world" (9). In another article, Peltier
described the gas chambers as the "key to the whole system". "Until
the business of the ’detail’ has been resolved," he wrote, "the
deprived inner suburbs will continue to flare up and France will
continue to sink (11)." The point could hardly be made more
clearly.
On 12 March 1998 Le Pen, accompanied by a party delegation, laid a wreath on the grave of François Duprat on behalf of the FN’s political bureau. He paid tribute to his dead comrade as a man "wholly devoted to politics" and a "writer of talent". In so doing, he exposed the true nature of the Front national for all to see.
